The force of
her father’s will moves across the country from Bulawayo to Harare. It takes
the route that Emily herself takes to get to university each term, past
Gweru, Kadoma, Chegutu. The force travels along the Bulawayo Road and
propels her from her bed to pack a small bag. Pens and note book, her new
diary. Three changes of underwear, three tee-shirts, two pairs of jeans. One
book: The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.

*****

Her clothes
are not wanted here, they remain in her bag. She wears a striped gown with
the many-wash-faded letters ANNEXE ANNEXE ANNEXE all over it. She is branded
across her breast, on her right arm, above her knees, across her back. She
is small, Emily. The gowns are supposed to be one-size-fits all but so
voluminous is hers that she feels like she is in a tent. In the window, she
catches her reflection. She cannot see herself. MockingNurseMatilda takes
down her particulars. Name, age, race, religion, height, weight. She asks
Emily what tribe she belongs to.

‘This is
what slows progress in this country’, Emily screams. ‘The notion of tribe is
a patronising Western construction,’ she adds when they have restrained her.
‘The Goths, Vandals and Visi-goths, those were tribes, they talk about
Serbian nationalism, but African tribalism. I do not have a tribe, I belong
to the nation.’

They force
her onto the bed.

‘I am a
student,’ she weeps. ‘A university student.’

‘Emilia is a
Catholic sister, Ezekiel is an army sergeant, Sonia there manages a hotel,’
MockingNurseMatilda says. ‘Welcome to the Annexe my dear, we welcome
students too.’

Emily reads
aloud from the Origins of the Family. A wave of gratitude washes over
her. These men, Marx and Engels, Karl and Friederich, dead and white, they
get it, they really, really get it. ‘In the first place, sexual love assumes
that the person loved returns the love; to this extent the woman is on an
equal footing with the man. Secondly, our sexual love has a degree of
intensity and duration which makes both lovers feel that non-possession and
separation are a great, if not the greatest, calamity; to possess one
another, they risk high stakes, even life itself.’

She cries
herself to sleep and sleeps a dreamless sleep. She wakes to find a Coloured
girl staring at her and smiling as she plays with the beads at the ends of
the braids on Emily’s hair. ‘Feel my baby,’ the Coloured girl says.

Her name is
Estelle, and she is a star rising high above the farinaceous reaches of all
that is ordinary and elemental. Nothing can touch her, and nothing does.

‘Feel my
baby’ she says again, eyes closed. She places Emily’s hand on her stomach,
chopping board flat. ‘He will be born tomorrow.’

‘Ralph.’
Estelle says the name like she is tasting its sound.

‘Ralph,’ she
repeats.

‘That is
what I’ll call him, Ralph, like the Karate Kid.’

Together
Emily and Estelle look out onto Second Street Extension where up and down
goes the little green bus.

*****

In the
Annexe, she finds that she is not the only one who is not mad.

‘I am not
mad’, says Ezekiel.

‘And I am
not mad’, says Estelle.

‘Why do you
look at me as though I am mad?’ asks Emilia and hits Ezekiel on the head. No
one is mad except the nurses with their faces out of focus, they are gone
and there they are again, with their large ears and large hands that grab
and say she needs rest. They give her three small pills, one orange, one
square and white, one round and white. She is happy that it is
NiceNurseLindiwe and not MockingNurseMatilda who helps her to a bed. There
is something Emily has to tell her, something important, terribly,
desperately important. It is the most important thing she has ever said to
anyone. She clutches NiceNurseLindiwe’s arm and looks into her eyes. ‘Beware
the Jabberwock my son,’ she says. ‘The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.
Beware the Jub-Jub bird and shun the Frumious Bandersnatch.’

*****

Ezekiel sits
in the corner away from the windows. Concentrated, he won’t show anyone what
he is doing. He reveals his work eventually, shyly, a pencil drawing of the
Taj Mahal. The domes and columns are delicately fragile in black and white.
‘That’s a building in India,’ he says. ‘I saw it in a book.’ The next time
that Ezekiel screams ‘Abraham, Abraham,’ Sister Emilia tears the drawing and
the Taj Mahal flutters in seven torn pieces to the floor. Ezekiel does
nothing but sit and draw another. He gives it to Emily. If possible, it is
even more beautiful than the first one. ‘It is the most beautiful thing that
I have seen,’ she says, and means it. She cries, for no reason. Ezekiel
puts his hand on her shoulder and smiles. Together, they look outside the
window. She persuades him to sing a new song. Continuing the common theme,
she chooses a Sunday school song that also features Abraham.

‘Father
Abraham has many sons

Has many
sons, has Father Abraham

I am one of
them and so are you.

So
let us praise the Lord.’

Up and down
Second Street Extension goes the little green bus.

*****

Emilia,
Emily, Estelle, Ezekiel. Madness seems reserved for those whose name starts
with the letter E. All of them Es, except for Sonia, the resident white. Her
hospital towel is twisted in a turban about her head. She smokes blue
Madison, regally, she holds the cigarette away from her as she says to
Emily, ‘You speak English well. Very well, for an African.’ She gives Emily
her cigarettes. The blue Madison is not harsh on the throat like Dr.
Chikara’s Kingsgate. Emily smokes one, five, this is the beginning of
addiction, here among the Es of the Annexe.

All of them
Es except for Sonia and MaBheki.

Emily has
learned to stay away from MaBheki in her corner. Her madness is of a
malevolent bent, an ungentle madness that requires restraints, and not just
the pills, orange and white, square and round.

‘I want my
meat,’ MaBheki screams.

She has
devoured all of her babies, she says, she is particularly fond of the flesh
of her boy children. A peculiar hunger comes over her when she sees a male
child, she says, she feels a compulsion to feed. She looks at Ezekiel as she
talks, and Emily sings him the new Abraham song until he is calm. MaBheki
is not long at the Annexe, her madness calls for rigour of the kind that the
Annexe cannot deliver. They strap her to take her out of the Annexe, out of
Harare and out of Mashonaland to Ingutsheni, the oldest, the biggest mental
hospital in the country, Ingutsheni, the place of fable, the constant rebuke
in the ears of the young: don’t talk like you are at Ingutsheni. Before
Ingutsheni was a mental hospital, it was a lunatic asylum, and there will
MaBheki’s voice join those of the dangerously mad, the criminally
insane.

MaBheki
bares her teeth and her eyes meet Emily’s.

‘I want my
meat,’ she says, and the door closes behind her.

In the
moment that the door closes on MaBheki, Emily sees the trajectory of
her own life: from the casual, almost conversational, question, how many
Dispirin would you take to kill yourself, overheard by Anna the sub-warden,
who puts the university machinery into operation by relaying the question to
the Warden who relays it to the Dean of Students who relays the question to
Dr. Chikara, who relays it to her parents who insist that she be sectioned
in the Annexe. She grasps this much: she is here, not because she asked the
question, but because someone overheard her ask the question. Depending on
whether she asks that question again, or, more precisely, depending on how
loudly she asks it, her life could go either way, to the little green bus up
Second Street Extension towards Bond Street, Pendennis and the university,
or the other way, turning where Second Street meets Julius Nyerere Way to go
past the National Gallery and the Monomotapa Hotel, past Town House and all
the way to the railway station to take the night train to Ingutsheni.